She Is Me (23 page)

“I think your sister would make a fine physician,” Tony said.

Daisy excused herself and headed for the bathroom.

Greta felt Daisy’s absence. She could have mourned Daisy’s absence. She could have mourned her mother’s absence. Perhaps she could have mourned her own.

“The surgeon wants to cut away portions of her jaw,” Greta said. The surgeon wanted to take off half of her mother’s jaw, actually. It was such an aggressive tumor, he said. A swaggering, belligerent, bloody-minded bully of a tumor that had taken over the left side of Lotte’s face. Greta wondered how much of the tension in the room had to do with Lotte and how much had to do with her.

“So, see? There’s hope,” Josh said. “Right, Dad?”

Greta said, “The dirty bastards.”

Elizabeth took off her shoes. The sand was wet and cold. The dog ran to the water’s edge, then chased each wave as it broke. Elizabeth watched him snapping at the foam. Over and over. Tim stood beside her.

“I don’t know what to say about your dog.”

She had put Temple’s expandable leash on and he ran, hard, until it pulled him up short. Elizabeth wondered what he thought he would accomplish, deliriously charging saltwater foam, then being jerked to a halt. Full of hope! Hopes dashed! Once, twice—a hundred times.

“He’s so passionate,” she said, “and it’s so pointless.”

“You think passion is supposed to have a point?”

Elizabeth reeled Temple in and petted his soaking head. He lunged at her, his teeth bared, grazing her hand, then whimpered and licked her, leaping in the air trying to kiss her face.

“I don’t know what to do about my mother,” she said. She let the dog charge back to the surf and followed him. The icy water circled around her bare feet. It was so cold it hurt. Why didn’t it bother Temple? He wagged his tail and shook himself, then plunged back into the surf. “What am I supposed to do?”

Tim was now just behind her. The wind was blowing.

“What?” he said.

She turned. “Nothing.”

Tim put his arms around her. He moved closer to her, resting his chin on her shoulder.

“Elizabeth,” he said, the sound private, so close to her ear, protected from the wind and the crash of the waves. And such a new sound; a private, secret sound. His lips were touching her neck. She thought, It was Tim who gave me the Pomeranian.

“The little brass dog . . .” she said.

“Another stray for your collection,” he said.

She felt his arms around her. She said, “My collection . . .”

He said, “You have so many strays to look after. But, I don’t know, I saw it, I thought of you . . .” His body was pressed against hers from behind. “I thought it might cheer you up.”

She thought, Tim wants to cheer me up. He got me a Pomeranian dog to cheer me up. A dog that requires no care. She felt his body against hers. And now, she thought, I will fall, leaving my life and my destiny behind. Or will I simply fall into place?

Temple dug in the wet sand. The moon shone on the water, a long wavering cord. The waves collided onto the sand. And, cheerless still, but overcome with desire, Elizabeth turned and kissed Tim on the mouth, and his hands were inside her clothes, beneath her skirt, beneath her sweater.

“Elizabeth,” he whispered in her ear, softer than the roar of the waves, soft enough for her to hear. Holding her hand, he led her back to the car. In the front seat, Temple growled irritably, like a bad conscience, and Elizabeth knew what she was doing was pointless. As pointless as passion. She pulled Tim down, surprised that he was not Brett, that his weight was not Brett’s, his movements were not Brett’s. She tried to breathe, but this stranger, this new lover, this man she didn’t know, whom she’d known for years, took up all her air. She was not Brett’s wife. She was no one’s wife. She gasped. She heard herself call the stranger’s name. His eyes were closed and his lashes were long. He held her down, his fingers digging into her arms. Passion was pointless and the moon lit his face.

There was no doubt in Greta’s mind after Thanksgiving. She’d sat there in her dining room and watched her family, admiring them, giddy with love for them, resolved to hurt them.

“It’s over for me,” she said to Daisy.

They were on a bench at the Santa Monica pier, the wind whipping Daisy’s black hair romantically. Greta noticed how her own hair stood up ridiculously and marveled for an instant at how a person could worry about messy hair while contemplating the dissolution of an entire lifetime.

“It’s over,” she said. “I watched everyone move and speak and I moved and spoke. And ate. And it was as if we were all underwater.”

Daisy did not respond. Perhaps that was not what Daisy wanted to hear. Perhaps she preferred the intrigue of an affair. Perhaps she had just been playing all along. The wind carried the sounds of the video arcade behind them. Gunshots. Squealing brakes. Diabolic laughter. Exploding bombs.

“I’m freezing,” Daisy said after a while.

Greta put her arm around Daisy’s shoulder and pulled her closer.

“I really have to tell him.”

She felt sick after she said it, an empty plunge, the ashen spin of a long, long fall. She stood up, trying to breathe in the fresh sea breeze. She leaned over the railing of the boardwalk. She held on to keep her balance, her head bent, looking at the water below, in case she vomited.

Chemotherapy had nothing on the dissolution of a life. Several lives. If I did vomit, she thought, it would have to fall such a long way. Like me.

She remembered a long-ago trip to the Caribbean with Tony and the children. To St. Kitts. They had taken a day trip to Nevis and seen a rainbow on the ferry and ragged, barefoot children in the rutted streets when they got there. A taxi-driver guide invited them to his sister’s restaurant for lunch, but, although overwhelmed by guilt at the poor children, they guiltily insisted on a seaside hotel that had once been a plantation. What had they had for lunch? She couldn’t remember, but then Josh and Elizabeth, so young that they shared the other double bed in the hotel room, had projectile vomited at each other all that night.

She remembered them as they slept the next morning, their exhausted, scrubbed faces nose-to-nose on the fresh pillowcases, Elizabeth clutching her teddy bear, Josh his worn puppy with its long ears.

Greta smiled. Below her, a gull bobbed on the waves. She and Tony had spent the night on their knees, mopping up vomit.

“You’re sure?” Daisy said. She stood beside Greta. She looked scared.

Was she sure? She kissed the top of Daisy’s head, black hair blowing against her cheeks, in her eyes. Behind them, a toddler screamed at an unearthly pitch. They began walking back to their cars.

“Soon . . .” Greta said, “. . . ish.”

“I’ve ruined your life,” Daisy said.

Greta nodded.

“I did
not,
” Daisy said.

She had hoped to see Harry’s bar mitzvah, but perhaps that was greedy. Spring? She could try to hang on until spring. But who could even tell when it was spring in this place? In St. Louis, the buds would swell on the bony trees and flowers would crawl out of the damp earth and birds would sing and people would switch to navy blue. But here? Enough flowers to choke a horse every month of the year. Trees that belonged in the jungle. Birds? Who knew? Could you hear them singing with the windows closed? With the air conditioner going?

She was having trouble swallowing. Even water was difficult. That she should live this long! To see the world full of pierced tongues and terrorists. And those anchormen, the dirty bitches, they should drop dead. Why were they always so nasty to Hillary? Anti-Semites, all of them.

“Grandma, I think you’ve got it backwards. You’re supposed to say the media are all Jews.”

Lotte realized she had been speaking out loud. And there was Elizabeth sitting in the chair by the bed.

“Darling, darling! I didn’t know you were here!” She held out her arms. Her arms were heavy but she held them out for her darling granddaughter. Sometimes the pain was so intense she noticed nothing else.

“The pain, the pain . . .” she said.

Elizabeth rubbed her feet, which were cold. They were always cold. She needed a pedicure. It was one thing that Kougi did not do well. She was too weak to go to the beauty parlor.

“That Christina Ammammabad, though,” she said. “She always looks good.”

She turned up the collar of her pajama top.

“See?” she said. “That’s style.”

“Why don’t I give you a pedicure?” Elizabeth asked, as if, again, she’d listened to Lotte’s thoughts.

Lotte heard the emery board.

“Did you ever do anything you were really sorry for? But you just kept doing it?” Elizabeth said.

“Who knows? Whatever you do, good or bad, sorry or not, you get punished, darling,” Lotte said. “Life kicks you in the balls, Elizabeth. Always remember that!”

“Great.”

“Your Grandma Lotte told you that.”

“Thanks.”

“So you have to kick back.”

Elizabeth moved to the other foot. The nails on the foot she had finished were a little too short. Lotte could feel it, but she said nothing. She didn’t want to hurt Elizabeth’s feelings. The girl did her best, poor thing.

“Your Grandma Lotte,” Lotte said. “On her deathbed.”

Where the hell had that come from? As the words escaped her mouth, she gasped and began to weep. She had frightened herself. Now, Lotte, shut up, you silly old crow!

“I don’t want another operation,” she wailed.

“I know.” Elizabeth came to the head of the bed and held her hand.

“But I want to get better,” Lotte said. She heard herself whimper pitifully. Well, she was entitled. If they didn’t like her whimpering, they could drop dead. She was a very sick woman.

“The surgery won’t cure me, will it?” she asked.

She waved Elizabeth back to the toe she was painting. Such a beautiful color. Silver. Not garish, though. Subtle.

“Not really,” Elizabeth said, softly, obviously embarrassed. “Just slow the tumor down.”

Lotte was grateful everyone referred to the cancer as the tumor. Cancer, that bastard, it should choke.

“I’m not ready,” Lotte said. She began to cry again. She began to wail again. “That dirty rotten bitch of a doctor, to cut me up for no reason, he can’t pull the wool over my eyes, thinks I’m a hillbilly from the sticks? Well, he’s got another thought coming! All they want is money, in their big Mercedes, they can all drop dead.”

Elizabeth hugged her and soothed her and dried her eyes and her oozing face with a tissue.

“Your grandmother’s a pistol!” Lotte said.

She watched Elizabeth smile, then give in to an involuntary snort of laughter.

There was no operation. Lotte did not go back into the hospital. Just morphine and some home-hospice visitors who tried to talk to her frankly and solicitously about death.

“Death? It should drop dead,” Lotte said, ungraciously.

Elizabeth spent more and more time with her, often bringing her laptop and working in the stuffy apartment. She saw very little of her own mother. I need to be with Grandma, she told herself. And that was true. But Elizabeth could not face her mother. That was also true.

Greta visited Lotte, too. On those weekends when Kougi was off and they were unable to get someone else, she stayed overnight. Lotte lay in bed with her eyes closed most of the day and all night. Greta forced her to walk in the hallway sometimes. She forced her to put on a clean nightgown. And Greta cleansed the tumor, wiping away the thick yellow scum. She inhaled the sickening smell and marveled that she was able to do it. She loved her mother and wondered if what she saw before her was possible, if her mother, so large a presence, cursing and exalting, could be this quiet lady rotting beneath Greta’s hand in its latex glove. Then she massaged Lotte’s big hands with lotion. Then she called Daisy and arranged to meet her for a few hours on her way home from the sickbed.

“Is it true that I never complain?” Greta asked Daisy.

“Pretty true.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. What a burden on other people, to have to guess, anticipate her needs. How considerate of her mother, who had complained day and night.

In January, Elizabeth brought two new sweaters to show her grandmother. Lotte, barely able to make a sound, waved her heavy arm and big hand at the blue one. She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger.

Then she pointed at the brown sweater and whispered something hoarse and indistinct. She waved at the sweater, indicating disgust.

That night she died. The tumor, oozing and stinking as vigorously as the doctor had promised, had been newly cleaned and swabbed with ointments. The pillows were smoothed and piled up. Lotte pointed at the light. She wanted it put out. Kougi held one of her hands. Elizabeth the other. Elizabeth listened to her labored breaths. When she stopped breathing, Elizabeth thought, She’s stopped breathing. It took a moment to realize that meant her grandmother was dead. She had wondered earlier if her grandmother’s hand would become cold when she died. But now she didn’t notice. She noticed only the silence.

When the ambulance came, she watched them carry Lotte out and thought, There will be a funeral. There are arrangements to be made. I will have to make them. What would Grandma want to wear? A shroud? Her navy-blue jacket from Victoria’s Secret?

When Greta and Tony and Josh arrived, Greta put her arms around Elizabeth and they cried.
Daisy,
Greta thought, irrelevantly, as she held Elizabeth and breathed in the fragrance of her daughter’s moisturizer and the substance of her mother’s death.

Greta knew what Lotte wanted to be buried in. A plain white shroud. “My clothes should go to you girls,” Lotte had said once, before it was clear that she was really going to die, before the words meant anything much. “You have to amortize my investment.”

And there would be no funeral. Lotte hated funerals. Anyway, all her friends were dead.

“Mommy, we have to do something,” Elizabeth said. They were gathered at Greta and Tony’s.

Greta heard only the word “mommy.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. Just a few people over to the house, okay?”